The Wall of Sound was an enormous public address system designed specifically for the Grateful Dead’s live performances by audio engineer Owsley „Bear“ Stanley. Used in 1974, the Wall of Sound fulfilled the band’s desire for a distortion-free sound system that could also serve as its own monitoring system. The Wall of Sound was the largest concert sound system built at that time.[1] As Stanley described it,

„The Wall of Sound is the name some people gave to a super powerful, extremely accurate PA system that I designed and supervised the building of in 1973 for the Grateful Dead. It was a massive wall of speaker arrays set behind the musicians, which they themselves controlled without a front of house mixer. It did not need any delay towers to reach a distance of half a mile from the stage without degradation.“